I just wrote something for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the role that professors and students played (and hope to play in the future) in the revolution. Groups like March 9 (established by professors to fight for academic freedom) and 6 April (established in solidarity with labour strikes but seemingly also the most active left-wing group among university students) played a role not just in planning and joining the protests, but in laying the groundwork for them. It will be interesting to see if, when national universities re-open next week, we'll see a surge of activism on campuses, which have been tightly monitored and controlled until now.

I'm also curious about the role that high-profile scientists and academics may have in the new government. The Egyptian-American scientists and Nobel winner Ahmad Zewail, in particular, seems to be someone worth watching.

Ursula Lindsey is the managing editor of the Arabist blog. She writes about culture, education and politics in the Arab world. She lived in Cairo from 2002 to 2013 and got her start at the ground-breaking independent magazine Cairo Times. She was the culture editor of Cairo magazine in 2005-2006 and served as special projects editor at the independent news site Mada Masr in 2013-2014. She is the Chronicle of Higher Education's Middle East correspondent. She contributes to the BBC-PRI radio program The World, and has written for Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, Bookforum and the blog of the London Review of Books.